Lee Jamison, Centenary class of 1979
This exhibition includes works from Jamison’s recent “Ode to East Texas” project as well as works he created as a Centenary student and during his time at the Barnwell Art Center. Works by Jamison’s artistic influences (Don Brown, Willard Cooper, Clyde Connell, Milton Fletcher, Kathie Giddings Troquille, and Hank Stoer) are also featured.
Though for the large majority of his adult life Lee Jamison has been known as an East Texas regionalist painter and muralist, and most recently for his effort to rehabilitate the region as a legitimate subject of uniquely Texan art with the book, Ode to East Texas, he is really from here. And by here he means more than just northwest Louisiana, or even Shreveport itself - but this campus. The first address the infant Lee Jamison lived at was in “Vet’s Villa,” somewhere either in the outfield of the present softball field or under the footprint of the Gold Dome. His father, Lawrence Jamison, had been a pitcher for the Gents baseball team. In the spring semester of 1956, he met Elsa Emmerich by teaching the young, and math-challenged, cashier at the school cafeteria how to make change. The pre-med student got help with math skills, the badly dyslexic athlete got a reading coach, and late in 1957 the couple brought home Centenary’s youngest resident.
Centenary was always near to the young family’s heart. Jamison recalls visiting friends of his parents in Centenary dorm rooms when he was still a very small child, and frequently being on the campus with extended family such as Katherine Sells Emmerich, his grandmother, and Edith Emmerich Mulling, his aunt, both Centenary graduates. Beyond that, the area near the campus where Jamison spent much of his childhood is, he says, inundated with memories.
After the historic hostile corporate takeover of Shreveport’s United Gas Pipeline Company by Pennzoil in 1968, the Jamison family was, in 1971, relocated to Houston where Lee attended Bellaire High School. Then, having always wanted to go to Centenary if it was possible to do so, he completed his college education here after two years at the also-Methodist-affiliated Lon Morris College of Jacksonville, Texas. At Centenary, Jamison studied under Willard Cooper, and after his graduation became the Art instructor at the Barnwell Garden and Art Center, operated by Shreveport Parks and Recreation on the Riverfront downtown. Here he also was reacquainted with fellow Lon Morris graduate, Melinda Olson. They married during his senior year.
Leaving Shreveport in 1981, Jamison began to settle into a career in art in Walker County, Texas by 1983. He has been a full-time artist ever since. The autobiographical bent of Ode to East Texas carries with it clues to Jamison’s return, as it demonstrates how critical lessons learned and influences felt at Centenary and the Barnwell were to the artist, and the man, he has become. Partly in honor of that importance, and partly out of recognition of a strong cultural continuity with his beloved East Texas, Jamison threw a blanket of affection for this region of Louisiana with the tongue-in-cheek appellation “Occupied East Texas” long ago.
“It is only 193 miles on pavement to come home,” Jamison says. “But it was a thirty-eight year journey between art shows to find the me I should bring home, to demonstrate what Centenary and Shreveport gave me, and helped to make of me.”
Caddo Lake Hunter, Lee Jamison, 2018, oil on canvas